How important is storytelling?  Is it essential in some way to the human endeavor, or is it simply nice to have, a way to chase away the demons sitting around the campfire through all those long years we humans lived as hunter-gatherers before there were sofas and Netflix?

A fascinating article by Ed Yong, “The Desirability of Storytellers,” in The Atlantic of Dec 5, 2017, attempts to get to the bottom of the role of storytelling.  In Yong’s telling of it, the storytelling art helps bring us together, instill cooperation (a matter of life and death for small bands of hunter-gatherers living at the subsistence level in a world of many perils), and reinforce group values.

But best of all, Yong argues that recent studies of a few remaining hunter-gatherer societies demonstrate that good storytelling confers an evolutionary advantage on the storytellers.  As someone who has devoted his life to helping people tell their stories, I have to like this line of reasoning.

How does it work?  Yong reports on what anthropologists who studied the Agta, a group of Filipino hunter-gatherers, concluded about the role of storytelling in this isolated community.  The scientists asked the group what sort of roles and qualities they valued most in their peers.  Was it hunters, fishers, healers?  It turns out the most prestigious profession, if that’s the right word, in this society, was storytelling.  The Agta want to hang with the storytellers above all others.  The storytellers have the most prestige in their society, and they attract the best partners and have the most children.

Following this line of reasoning back to early tribes and you begin to create an evolutionary argument for the primacy of storytelling.  And it’s not just the Agta.  According to Yong, other still-current hunter-gatherer groups value storytelling in the same way, and storytelling itself goes back as far as recorded history – and what evidence there is in pre-history.  The linguistic evidence suggests that we’ve been telling some of the same stories for more than 6,000 years, and probably a lot longer.

All of this is great if you’re already a believer, but what does it offer the sceptic who still isn’t persuaded of this storytelling stuff, preferring facts, figures, charts, and the occasional anecdote?  After all, good storytelling is hard and can take a lifetime to master.  What’s in it for us today?

The key to the modern importance of storytelling is in that word ‘cooperation’.  A good deal of the important work of being a leader — creating strong bonds with followers and colleagues, evaluating the mental states of people around us, persuading others to share a vision that we can see but others cannot — begins with the stories that leaders tell.  Leaders who focus only on the facts and numbers will ultimately be half-complete leaders — and not the most important half at that.

Are strong storytelling skills essential for successful leadership? In many ways, leadership is storytelling, since leaders are defined by their followers, and you can’t create, inspire, and direct followers without telling them a story worth getting behind. A leader who is a strong storyteller has a chance to be successful through his or her followers. A weak storyteller has no chance at all.